Blog Posts directing back to Membership Options page...

[nphough]

Hi - Installed s2Member yesterday and love it - prob when I went to post today, all links back to my page (i.e. in went to the Membership Options page even though I was linking to my blog archive. Has anyone else had this problem? Thanks in advance!
www.savingsupper.com

[rossagrant]

Could you be a little more specific.

At what point are you redirected to your membership options page?

It would point to the fact that the page you were trying to access is protected and the account you were accessing that page with doesn't have the privileges to view the page, thus you are redirected.

Could you break down the steps you are going through and with which account?

Thanks

[nphough]

Hi Thanks for your reply. I posted my blog entry to FB via Leenk and wen I went to share it on FB it actually grabbed the Membership options page instead. And then went I went to click back on the original FB link it went to Membership options. I checked post specific permissions and the post archive # had actually appeared there so I deleted it then deleted the FB posts and manually reposted them but the same thing happened...

[rossagrant]

Wow, that is pretty strange behaviour!

So you posted a link to a specific POST to facebook and instead of grabbing the post, it grabbed the membership options page?

What is the link you are trying to share, I'll try it for you.

I seem to be able to access your blog archive no problem so that isn't protected.

Just double check all of the post/ page and URI restriction settings in the backend of S2 member and also check the restriction settings in the top right hand corner box of the ACTUAL POST editing page too. Sometimes these can get set by mistake if you aren't careful, especially if autofill is on on your computer.

It sounds like it's a simple setting that has been activated by accident. We'll get to the bottom of it though!

[nphough]

Thank you so much. I am really hoping to sort this out - I was thrilled to discover s2Member and have big plans for it, but I also blog twice a week! Here is the post I was trying to link to: http://savingsupper.com/archives/499
Just tried it again on FB and it is still doing the same thing. (You can see if you go to the link it is something different than what comes up). Checked the Post Level Restriction drop down on the post page and it is blank.

[rossagrant]

Right, now i think I get it.

What this is actually doing is showing the WRONG META heading and description for the page.

When I try to share the link on FB, it actually displays the correct link and it does link correctly to your article no problem. What it is doing wrong though is displaying the wrong META info which is found in the header of each of your posts.

Are you using a plugin for SEO?

All we need to do is sort out the meta info for each post/ page and you'll be fine.

Now you can either manually input the info into your page template in the file header.php or you can install an SEO plugin to edit these through the backend of WP.

Google Wordpress SEO and install the plugin by Yoast. It's a great SEO plugin. All in One SEO is another also.

You can also google for 'wrong image when sharing facebook links' and you'll see lots of articles to show you how to work around that.

Unfortunately Facebook tends to just grab the first useful picture it finds on a page and this can often be completely unrelated to the post.

Let me know if this makes sense and I'm sure we can get it sorted for you!

[nphough]

You're a lifesaver. So I see what you mean that it is actually directing to the right place but pulling the wrong data. I installed the Yoast SEO plugin. I don't really know if I set it up correctly - added things like %%title%% (etc) for all the templates under the title tab. Also deleted another Meta plugin I had that I think was putting the same data on every page. Emptied cache, tried again, but... problem still the same... Separate issue: Now that I have the SEO installed I'm embroiled in trying to migrate my permalinks to %postname% make the SEO better but none of the migration plugins seem to work...

[rossagrant]

Inside a post edit screen you will now have an SEO box underneath where you write your post.

You will need to write a specific META Description, Title and Keyword in each post in order to gain successful SEO rankings. This should also solve the issue with facebook showing the wrong title and description.

That other meta plugin you had may well have been causing this issue too.

In terms of changing permalinks, there are a number of plugins available to migrate permalinks for existing links that might be on google.

For instance if you have this link on Google now,

http://savingsupper.com/archives/499

and then you changed it to include the blog title rather than numerical it might cause a 404 page not found error when someone clicks on it.

The fact that you have only a few articles on your site right now means that isn't a massive issue so you don't have to migrate the permalinks if you don't want to.

Simply go into Settings__> permalinks in the backend of WP and choose a different preset. ALL your links will update and that's it.

Just make sure if you linked to any of your old posts you now change them to the new link structure or again you'll get some 404 errors.

Let me know how you get on!

[Cristián Lávaque]

This plugin could help with the permalink changes http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/per ... rmanently/

[nphough]

So I used the SEO to set up info for all my posts and migrated my permalinks from numbers to /%category%/%title%/ and once I did these two things, the problem was solved! Hooray!
None of the permalink plugins worked for me. I'm not sure but I'm wondering if it is because I was using just a number before. So I installed Quick Page/Post Redirect and created numbered posts with the old numbers and manually redirected each of them. (PITA!) (luckily there weren't too many)
Thanks again for all your help. I would have had no idea which direction to go with this!
Cheers!

[Cristián Lávaque]

I'm glad you solved it! Well done! Thanks for reporting back on this.

And thanks Ross for your help!